


the scraps left behind

by Duck_Life



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Body Horror, Friendship, Gen, Neibolt Eddie, Neibolt Richie, Neibolt Stan - Freeform, Post-Canon, Spiderhead Stanley, The House on 28 Neibolt Street (IT)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 21:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21143222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Stan adjusts to Neibolt. (Or, the thing that Stan has become adjusts to Neibolt.)





	the scraps left behind

All living things must obey the laws of the form they inhabit.

Stan remembers waking up in the fridge. 

Stan remembers… Stan remembers everything. 

He remembers bringing the coffee canister of shower caps to the clubhouse. He remembers passing them out to his friends so they won't get spiders in their hair. 

(The irony isn't lost on him.)

He remembers losing his head— literally— and rolling to face his friends. They're all so old. All grown-up. Something's there on Eddie's face, a bandage, a wound. Bill is watching him with horrified eyes, and Stan starts talking before he realizes what he's about to say. 

"It's your fault, Bill," he says, because isn't it? Bill dragged them to Neibolt the first time. Bill made them all feel brave and strong, fed them beautiful lies about heroism and friendship. Bill made them all swear. 

(Stan remembers the promise. Stan remembers taking a bath.)

But no, Stan never really blamed Bill. Did he? It's become so muddled. Like he's sleepwalking. Like someone (something) is pulling his strings.

And then he feels something, a kind of pressure radiating from inside his skull. Like something hatching. If he had a heart, it would be racing. 

"Richie," Stan says, and suddenly he is not Pennywise's puppet. Fear makes him strong, gives him a slice of himself back. "What's happening to me?"

The legs sprout from his skin, from the corners of his eyes, his cheeks, his scalp. "You gotta be fucking kidding me," Richie hisses, and then It takes Stan over again. 

  
  


This is how it works: you cannot make a convincing copy without at least a piece of the real thing. Call it a soul; call it a memory. Whatever it is, it’s there. 

  
  
  
  


Neibolt falls.

Those who live there (if it can be called living), scurry down to the sewers until the dust settles. Down the well, into the tunnels below. Rubble and gravel sift through the stones, trying to bury them. 

Something has changed. Around dawn, something changed. The Losers killed It, and Neibolt fell with It. But the things, the copies and mimics and monsters, they hung around. Like residue. Puppets with their strings cut. 

Spider legs skitter across the tunnel floor. Stan coughs up a cloud of dust. Someone speaks— "Fuck… Stan the Man?"

It takes Stan's eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. The thing sauntering toward him is too small, spindly and skinny and strange. Maggots crawl from the holes in his head and chest. "Hardly a man now," Stan points out. He is pieces and parts of himself, memories in a mosaic with missing pieces. He has become the kind of thing he used to have nightmares about. 

"Welcome to the club," someone else says from the darkness. Eddie steps out of the shadows… well, Almost Eddie. Almost Eddie is pale with sunken cheeks and dark shadows around his eyes. Black sludge drips from his mouth and ears, covers most of his old t-shirt. 

"Why am I here?" Stan asks.

The Richie Thing scoffs. "We said your name three times and you just showed up, Beetlejuice," he says.

  
  


You are what you wish you could forget. Alternatively, you are the worst feelings you have ever felt.

"You left me!" Stan remembers screaming. "You made me come to Neibolt. You're not my friends." He does not remember what happened next. His friends made him come to Neibolt, and now he is trapped here forever. 

Pennywise made a FrankenStanley out of every bad thought Stan has ever had and now he is stuck like this, a head on legs full of anger and fear. 

God, he wishes he could see the birds from down here. 

"It's not so bad," the Eddie Thing tells him, running a hand through his curls. "Once you get used to it, it's not so bad."

  
  


“I love you, you know,” the puppet tells him. If Stan just doesn’t look, he almost sounds like Richie. “The real Richie loves the real Stan. But I love you, I think. If I can.” 

Stan wonders what happens if you die while you’re having a nightmare. Maybe it’s this. “I tried to kill you,” he remembers. Except that that was the real Richie. Stan remembers attacking him, crouching over his head and trying to choke the life out of him. Richie had looked so grown-up.

The puppet doesn’t say,  _ That wasn’t me _ or  _ I’m not that Richie _ . He says only, “I forgive you.” 

  
  


The puppet thing catches his attention and shows him how to climb, how to crawl and creep and scuttle upward through the pipes. The two of them walk through damp tunnels, and if Stanley just closes his eyes… no, even then he can't pretend.

He feels the way his too-many legs move, all of them spindling onward. 

He follows Not-Quite-Richie to the end of the pipe, where an iron grate seals it off. Beyond the grate, though, is a creek. 

Running water. Trees. And— "Birds," Stan marvels, looking through the grate. A robin flits across the ground looking for pine straw. A bluejay lands on a branch up above. "Richie," he says, even as he tries to correct himself—  _ that isn't Richie and you aren't Stan _ . "Thank you."

"They loved you," Richie points out. "The real ones. They really, really loved you."

The birds chirp. Richie isn't Richie and Stan isn't Stan.

The birds are still the birds, though. 


End file.
